A Reflection from a refugee camp at the US-Mexico Border

Three years ago, as we came together with family and in celebration over the holidays, the stark image of a young Syrian boy’s dead body floating ashore in a desperate attempt to escape to safety captured the world’s attention and urgently demanded action. The complicity of governments’ in this young boy’s death reflected the grave costs of global inaction to humanitarian crisis. This year again, as we enter the new year, a crisis is building at the U.S.-Mexico border as politicians play politics with human lives.

I spent the last 9 days in Barretal, the Mexican government run refugee camp where individuals and families who traveled with the Refugee Caravan are being forcibly held. I worked with a local organization to help provide legal advice around the asylum process and help people prepare for their asylum interviews. Barretal is the U.S. and Mexican government’s response to years of failed immigration, economic, and foreign policies. It is also the stark illustration of an anticipated new deal where President Trump hopes that asylum seekers escaping violence and persecution will be made to “remain in Mexico” while awaiting the processing of their asylum applications.

To contextualize migration conversations, it is important to understand the reality in the camp, in the journey made by migrants within it, and in the injustice and violence of the U.S. asylum process itself.

Conditions in the camp itself are insufferable. The 1500 migrants remaining from the caravan are currently trapped in a militarized camp 45 minutes from Tijuana’s center and the U.S. border point of entry. There is no running water, no school for children, and migrants risk attack by neighboring communities or deportation by Mexican authorities if they venture outside the abandoned club’s walls. While I was there, two teenagers were lured out of a safe shelter, tortured, and murdered and a tear gas bomb was thrown into the camp. Over 2000 people have been deported by the Mexican government since the Caravan arrived in November 2018 and others have faced forceful eviction by the government out of other migrant shelters.

Adding to the growing hopelessness in the camp are the procedural hurdles and tightened border conditions, extending the wait time to even begin the asylum process. Migrants in Tijuana are looking at a 3-4 month long wait just for the opportunity to apply for asylum. Daily, people in the camps there make life and death decisions between two bad options -- wait in the camp and hope to have the opportunity to apply for protection through the legal asylum process, or take a dangerous and illegal chance crossing the border illegal. Pressures to abandon U.S. asylum claims exist throughout the camp as the Mexican government, likely at the U.S. government’s behest daily tricks and pressure migrants into visa programs that harm their chances of winning asylum in the U.S. or prey on the restlessness in the camp to pressure migrants into agreeing to their own deportations. The “humanitarian visas” provided by the Mexican government offer “opportunity” to go work every day in Mexico’s infamous maquiladoras [sweatshop factories].

The hopelessness by the time migrants reach the U.S. border is heightened by the insufferable conditions of the journey north itself. Most migrants traveled two months, mostly on foot, throughout Central America and Mexico. Children I spoke with normalized the violence of the journey, as they spoke of friends being targeted by narco-traffickers and and falling off of trains and trucks. Unfortunately, the perilous journey does not end at migrants’ border crossing, as the U.S. immigration process uses detention, family separation, and violence against migrants to ensure that only those most willing to risk it all see the process to its end.

Most families only decide to make such a difficult journey after serious life-threatening persecution or conditions back home that leave no choice but to flee and no availability of a “return home” option. Militarized borders and aggressive arrest and detention practices only add violence and risk to journeys that will inevitably occur. I sensed this vulnerability in migrants’ choices over and over again, but most personally in conversations with a young fifteen year old boy weighing his options. He described his escape from Honduras alone after he refused to join a gang who proceeded to kill his father and threatened to take his life for his refusal to join. At the camp, he had suffered from the helplessness around him, falling victim to robbery. This child, who I had shared authentically child-like moments swapping english and spanish, dreams of school in America, and kicking a soccer ball around, now described to me his plan to chart a path “North” hoping to just cross the border and get found by immigration agents as he could no longer bare to wait in the camp. Often people’s only source of comfort was to look forward and repeat “En Dios confiamos” [in God we trust].

I have written about the political importance of the Caravan. It became clear that the creation of the refugee camp of Barretal was an intentional attempt to make this refugee community difficult to access support-wise and to reduce their power through forced relocation away from the border. For, the Caravan is helping illustrate the lengths to which people will go to achieve physical and economic security for their families and puts human faces on the victims of the U.S.’ unjust immigration policies.

Ultimately, future caravans are inevitable as conditions continue to make dangerous escape feel necessary and the collective nature of the travel makes it accessible and relatively safer. We can only hope that the organization of thousands of migrants at the border finding one way or another to cross will help put pressure to change what are fundamentally unjust and restrictive immigration policies that fail to account for the U.S. role in destabilizing countries that so many are now forced to flee from. As the Caravan calls collectively for their rights to migrate, we must firmly oppose all measures that increase the risk and violence of this migration, including policies like “remain in Mexico” in proven uninhabitable camps like Barretal.

- Sima Atri, Dec. 2018

I write this to honor both the love and resilience I experienced in the refugee camp at the U.S. – Mexico border, contrasted with the deep hopelessness and vulnerability that is leading people everyday to make life and death decisions no humans should ever have to choose between when searching for economic and physical safety or family reunification. Si se puede.